The Forbidden Circle (15 page)

It drove Andrew half mad to hear her sobbing, and to be unable to reach her, touch her, comfort her somehow. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her close, quiet her crying. And she stood there before him, looking so real, so solid, he could see her breathing and the tears that kept rolling down her face, and yet he could not so much as touch her fingertips. He said helplessly, “Don’t cry, Callista. Somehow Damon and I will find you, and if he won’t, I’ll damn well try it myself!”

Raising his eyes suddenly, he saw Damon standing in the doorway. Damon’s eyes were wide. He said, on an in-drawn breath of amazement, “Is Callista
here?
”

“I can’t believe you can’t see her,” Andrew said, and felt again that strange, tentative outreach of contact, like a touch directly on his mind—he didn’t resent it. At least Damon could know that he was telling the truth.

“I never really doubted you,” Damon said, and his eyes were wide with wonder and dismay.

“Damon is here? Damon!” Callista said, and her lips trembled “You say he is here and I cannot see him. Like a ghost, a ghost in my own house and my brother’s room—” She made a desperate attempt to control her weeping. Andrew felt the desperation of her struggle to stay calm. “Tell Damon he must find my starstone.
They
did not find it; I was not wearing it. Tell him I do not wear it around my neck as he does his own.”

Andrew repeated this aloud to Damon. He felt uncomfortably like a trance medium supposedly relaying messages from a disembodied spirit. The thought made him shudder; they were usually dead.

Damon touched the thong around his neck and said, “I had forgotten she knew that. Tell her Ellemir has it, she found it beneath her pillow, and ask—”

Andrew repeated his words, and Callista interrupted him. “That explains why—I knew
someone
had touched it, but if it was Ellemir—” Her shadowy form wavered and flickered, as if the effort to stay present with them had taxed her beyond endurance. To Andrew’s quick cry of concern she whispered, “I am very weak—I feel as if I were dying—or perhaps . . . Watch the stone,” and she was gone. Andrew stood looking, in terror, at the place where she had disappeared. When he repeated her words Damon ran down the corridor, shouting for Ellemir.

“Where were you?” he demanded irascibly, when finally she appeared.

She looked at him in astonishment and annoyance. “What is the matter with you? My clothes were soaked in blood; I have been tending wounded men. Have I no right to a bath and clean garments? I sent the very servants for so much!”

How like and how unlike Callista
, Andrew thought, and felt a completely irrational resentment, that this one was walking around free, enjoying a bath and fresh clothes and Callista was alone and crying in the dark somewhere.

“The starstone, quickly,” Damon demanded. “We can see in it if Callista is alive and well.” He explained to Andrew, quickly, that when a trained matrix worker died, his starstone “died” too, losing color and brilliance. Ellemir drew it out, handling it gingerly through the insulating silk, but it pulsed as brightly as ever.

Damon said, “She is exhausted and frightened, it may be, but she is physically very strong, or the stone could not shine so brightly. Andrew! When she comes to you again, tell her that she must somehow force herself to eat and drink, to be strong, to keep her strength up until we can somehow come to her! I wonder why she was so insistent that we must find her starstone?”

Andrew stretched out his hand to it, and said, “May I—?”

“It is hardly safe,” Damon said hesitantly. “No one can use a stone keyed to another.” Then he remembered. Callista was a Keeper, and they were so highly trained that, sometimes, they could key themselves in to someone else’s stone. Leonie had held his in her hands many times, and while Ellemir’s lightest touch on it, even though it had saved his life, had been agony, Leonie’s had hurt him no more than the touch of Leonie’s hand on his cheek. During his training, before they taught him how to key his own starstone to the rhythm of his own brain and energies, he had been trained with his Keeper’s stone; and for that time he had been so in touch with Leonie that they were wide open to one another.
Even now a thought will bring her to me
, he thought.

Andrew knew what Damon was thinking.
It’s as if he were broadcasting his thoughts to me. I wonder if he knows it?
He said quietly, “If Callista and I weren’t awfully close in touch somehow, I don’t think she’d keep coming back to me.” He hesitated a moment, reluctant to reveal more, then realized that for Callista’s sake, for all their sakes, it was unfair to keep back even what should have been private and highly personal. He said, trying to keep his voice even, “I—I love her, you know. I’ll do whatever you think is best for her, no matter what it takes. You know more about this kind of thing than I do. I’m completely in your hands.”

For an instant Damon felt a sting of revulsion (
This alien, this stranger, even his thoughts defile a Keeper
), then he made himself be fair. Andrew was not a stranger. However it had happened, however it came about, this alien, this Earthman, had
laran
. As for loving a Keeper, he himself had loved Leonie all his life, and she had never been angry about it or felt it an intrusion, even though she had never responded even a breath to his desire; his love she had accepted, although in an entirely sexless way. Callista was probably equally capable of defending herself, if she wished, against this stranger’s emotions.

Andrew was getting very tired of seeing everything that happened through Damon’s eyes. “One thing I
don’t
understand,” he said. “Why must a Keeper necessarily be a virgin? Is it a law? Something religious?”

“It has always been so,” said Ellemir, “from the most remote past.”

That, of course, Andrew thought, wasn’t a reason. Damon sensed his dissatisfaction and said, “I don’t know if I can explain it properly—it’s a matter of nerve energies. People have only so much. You learn to protect your energy currents, how to use them most effectively, how to relax, to safeguard your strength. Well, what uses most human energy? Sex, of course. You can
use
it, sometimes, to channel energy, but there are limits to that sort of thing. And when you’re keyed into the matrix jewels—well, the energy
they
will carry is limitless, but human flesh and blood and brainwaves can stand only so much. For a man it’s fairly simple. You can’t overload with sex because if you’re too heavily overloaded, you simply can’t function sexually at all. Matrix telepaths find that out fairly early in the game. You have to go on short rations of sex if you want to keep enough energy to do your work. For a woman, though, it’s easy to—well, to overload. So most of the women have to make up their minds to stay chaste, or else be very, very careful not to key into the more complex matrix patterns. Because it can kill them, very quickly, and it’s not a nice death.”

He remembered a story Leonie had told him, early in the training. “I told you, once, that it wasn’t easy to ravish a Keeper, unwilling—but that it could be done, it
had
been done. There was a Keeper once—she was a princess of the House of Hastur—and it was during one of the wars, when such women could be used as pawns. So the Lady Mirella Hastur was kidnapped, and they flung her out at the city gates, believing she was now useless to work against them. But the other Keeper in the Tower had been killed outright, and there was no one to act against the invaders who were storming Arilinn. So the Lady Mirella concealed what had been done to her, and went into the screens, and fought for hours against the forces mustered against them. But when the battle was over and the invaders lay, all of them, dying or dead at the city gates, she came down from the screens, and fell dead at their feet, burned out like a spent torch. Leonie’s grandmother was a
rikhi
, and Under-Keeper, at that time, and she saw the Lady Mirella die, and she said that not only was her starstone blasted and blackened, but that the Lady’s hands were burned as with fire and her body scorched by the energies she could no longer control. There is a monument to her in Arilinn,” he concluded. “We pay our respects to her memory each year at Festival Night, but I still believe it is there as a warning to any Keeper who trifles with her powers—or her chastity.”

Andrew shuddered, thinking,
Maybe it’s just as well I couldn’t touch Callista even for a moment. I wonder, though, if Damon told this story to keep me from getting ideas later on!

Damon gestured to Ellemir and said, “Give him the stone, child. Touch it lightly at first, Andrew. Very lightly. Your first lesson,” he added wryly. “Never grasp a starstone hard in your hands. Handle it, always, as if it were a living thing.”
Must I, too, work as a Keeper? To train him, as Leonie trained me?

Andrew took the stone from Ellemir’s outstretched fingers. He had caught Damon’s resentful thought and wondered what the slender Comyn Lord was angry about. Were all the telepaths women here, so Damon felt that being one made him less of a man? No, it couldn’t be that, or he wouldn’t have one of the stones himself, but Andrew felt there was
something
. The starstone felt faintly warm, even through the silk. He had somehow expected it to feel like any other jewel, cold and hard. Instead it had the warmth of a live thing in his palm.

Damon said, in a low voice, “Now take off the silk. Very gently and slowly. Don’t look at the stone right away.”

He unwrapped the insulating silk, and saw Ellemir flinch. She said in a low voice, “I felt that.”

Damon said swiftly, “Cover it again, Andrew.” He obeyed, and Damon asked, “Did it hurt when he touched it?”

Can we use Ellemir as a barometer to Callista’s reactions?
Andrew thought.

“It didn’t exactly
hurt
,” Ellemir said, her brow knitted, evidently trying to be very exact about her reactions. “Only—I
felt
it. Like a hand touching me. I’m not sure where. It wasn’t even really unpleasant. Just—somehow, intimate.”

Damon frowned slightly. “You’re developing
laran
,” he said. “That’s evident. That may be helpful.”

She looked frightened and said, “Damon! Is it—dangerous for me? I am no virgin.”

Twin to a Keeper and so ignorant?
Damon thought in exasperation, then saw that she was really afraid. He said quickly, “No, no,
breda
. Only for those women who work at the highest levels in the screens or with the most powerful stones. You might, if you overworked—and you were exhausted with lovemaking, or pregnant—get a bad headache or a fainting fit. Nothing worse. There are women, Tower-trained, working among us there, who need not live by a Keeper’s laws.”

She looked relieved and faintly embarrassed. It was evidently not, Andrew thought, the kind of thing girls here usually blurted out in front of strangers. Although sexual taboos here seemed to be different than they were among Terrans, they seemed to have plenty of them.

Damon said, “Ellemir, touch my stone a moment. Lightly—careful,” he said, gritting his teeth as he unwrapped the stone.

Andrew, watching, thought he was braced as if for a low blow. Ellemir laid her fingertip lightly on the stone, and Damon only sighed a little.

So Ellemir and I are keyed together somehow
, he thought.
It’s understandable. It always happens in sympathy like this. If we came closer still, if I took her to my bed, perhaps she could even learn to use it. Well, if I needed a good reason
. . . He laughed a little, harshly, aware that once again he was broadcasting his thoughts both to the woman who was their subject and to the man who was still, by ordinary standards, a stranger. Well, they’d all better get used to it. It would be worse before it was better.

“For what it’s worth,” he said aloud, and Andrew heard the tension and fear in his voice, “it seems Ellemir can handle my stone without hurting me. Which helps. As for you, Andrew, I
think
I can key you into Callista’s stone without danger to her. It’s a risk we’ll have to take. You’re our one link with her. For what we’re going to have to do—”

Andrew looked quizzically at the older man and asked, “Precisely what
are
we going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I can’t make definite plans until Dom Esteban wakes. Her father has a right to share in any plans we make.”
Besides
, Damon thought grimly,
by then we’ll know whether or not he can take any part in the rescue
. “But whatever we do, Callista will have to know about it. And, anyway”—he saw Ellemir flinch as he said it—“even if Callista should be hurt, or killed, we would still have to go out against whomever is doing this in the darkening lands.”

Andrew thought,
I’m only in this for Callista’s sake; I want no other part of it
. But before Damon’s haggard face he could not bring himself to say so. He was still holding the wrapped stone.

Damon sighed deeply and said, “Unwrap it again. Touch it—lightly. Ellemir?” He glanced at the woman, and she nodded.

“Yes. I feel it when he touches it, still.”

Andrew gingerly held the stone between his palms. He was seated on a low chair near the window, Damon standing before him. Damon said grimly, “I’d better guard against what happened last time.” He dropped cross-legged on the thick carpet, drawing Ellemir down beside him.

Andrew, watching Damon’s face, thought,
He’s afraid. Is it that dangerous?

Damon’s gray eyes met the Earthman’s, as he said, “Don’t deceive yourself; yes, it is. People who use these skills without adequate training can do immense harm. I ought to tell you there’s some risk to you, too. Usually the business of keying anyone into a matrix is handled by a Keeper. I’m not.”
Leonie said, if I had been born a woman, I’d have made a Keeper
. For the first time this thought did not bring Damon the usual ration of self-contempt, doubt of his own manhood. Instead, he felt faintly grateful. It could save all their lives.